Girl Most Likely

The making of Tina Fey

by Molly Minturn

Tina Fey usually arrived early to her classes at the University of Virginia. Drama professor Richard Warner remembers heading down early to Culbreth B006, a basement classroom, and finding Fey sitting there, coolly thumbing through the New York Times, waiting for everyone else to show up. "I spent every waking moment there," Fey says of the drama building.

Fey (Col '92) was known for constantly taking notes in black-and-white composition books, not just in class, but wherever she happened to be. "I would just sit there, watching her write and write and write," Fey's friend Cady Garey (Grad '93) says. "I finally asked her, 'What is it that you're writing down?' And she said, 'Oh, just stuff. Anything I think of.'"

That "stuff" tended to be observations about the world around her, some of them "caustic," as Fey has described her own behavior at UVA, but almost always correct. "She would peg people pretty quickly," Garey says.

Warner, too, remembers Fey always writing and observing, hovering between being a part of the group and also many steps ahead of it. "She had this wonderful way about her: something would happen—something funny, or something emotional—and the room would get quiet, and Tina would say the perfect thing. When I think about her work today, that's really still what it is."

The gift for satire that Fey has displayed on Saturday Night Live and 30 Rock was there when she was a student, as was her tremendous work ethic. When Fey returned to UVA in September as the inaugural speaker in the President's Speaker Series for the Arts, she displayed that old ability to hover between realms, engaging with the audience and also making quick, precise jokes about society.

She made speaking in front of thousands look easy, but Garey admitted Fey was nervous: "She said that she had been working and working on what she was going to say." At a reception afterward in Newcomb Hall, people congratulated Fey on her speech, and she made a gesture of relief, sighing and sweeping her hand across her forehead.

Perhaps this is part of what makes Fey so intriguing. She is world famous ("I mean, she was listed as one of Time magazine's 100 most important people in the world!" drama professor Bob Chapel, says, laughing. "Unbelievable."), but remains, as numerous friends and professors say, "a real person," or in the words of her friend Jenny Bennett, an "authentic badass."

"I think for Tina, it is about the work. It's not about the fame," says Doug Grissom, a playwright and drama professor at UVA, who taught Fey playwriting. "She's just very grounded … I think that's why she's able to keep doing everything so well, because it's all about the work."

Finding Her People

Fey's 1992 Corks and Curls photo

In Fey's book, Bossypants, her chapter about UVA begins: "Let me start off by saying that at the University of Virginia in 1990, I was Mexican. I looked Mexican, that is, next to my fifteen thousand blond and blue-eyed classmates, most of whom owned horses, or at least resembled them."

"I always felt like my UVA experience was kind of fun, like going to school abroad," she said wryly in an interview. As an undergraduate, she found a home in Culbreth Theatre. "There was a somewhat conservative environment at Virginia, and then the drama department was just a bit different. It was this little insular community," she says. Fey's UVA professors remember her as "a very good citizen" of the department, someone who wrote, directed and acted in plays, who worked backstage in the costume and scene shop, who took every drama class there was to take.

In Fey’s Footsteps

Where did Tina Fey hang out at UVA?

Metcalf
Fey lived in this residence hall her first year, along with her friend Jenny Bennett.

UVA Drama Building
“I found a home in the drama department,” Fey says. “I spent the bulk of my time there.” Fey appeared in numerous productions as a student, landing the starring role of Sally Bowles in Cabaret. She also wrote a one-act play, Sunday Girls, and watched it being performed in the black box theater. “It was so fulfilling to me and so exhilarating in a way that acting, the way I do it, never was,” she says.

Drama Building Bonus
According to Bennett: “As her final project for the class Theater of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, Tina decorated the ladies’ room in the fancy theater lobby (meant for patrons) with all kinds of lady products—makeup and beauty devices, hair contraptions, maxi pads stuck on the walls ... all to the soundtrack of ‘How Lovely to Be A Woman’ from Bye Bye Birdie. It was awesome.”

Lambeth
Fey lived in Lambeth Field Apartments to be close to the drama building. “I liked Lambeth,” she says, “although I realized that was probably not that cool to just keep living on Grounds.”

Rising Sun Bakery
Fey frequented this Corner bakery, once located on 14th Street (it closed in 1997). “I ate lunch there every single day for two years,” Fey says.

Clemons Library
“My friend Jenny Bennett and I used to watch the VHS copy of [Stephen] Sondheim’s Into the Woods pretty much every Friday night in Clemons Library as part of an abstinence program that we accidentally founded,” Fey said in her speech at UVA.

Brandon Avenue
Fey lived in an apartment at the end of Brandon Ave. with her friend Cady Garey (who is the namesake for the main character in Mean Girls, Cady Heron). “We really didn’t have any furniture,” Garey says, “just mattresses on the floor and a bean bag in the living room.”

Her initial theater experience at UVA was in a First Year Players production of Godspell. Bennett (Col '92), who is now a director and actress in New York, met Fey for the first time at auditions for that show. "When you're auditioning, you're scoping everybody out, and everyone there had long hair except for me and Tina," she says. "I had this sort of leftover muffinhead from a terrible hair accident a few months prior. Tina was like, 'Who's that other girl with the short hair?'"

The two became close friends, and threw themselves completely into the UVA theater world. "There was so much opportunity here," Bennett says. "The secret was you just had to claim it." When Fey and Bennett ran out of undergraduate drama classes to take, they moved on to graduate-level classes. They both got assistantships to create their own projects. "We could say, 'Oh, I want to direct a showcase,'" Bennett says, "and our professors would say, "Get the rights; here's 50 bucks. Make a play show up.' And we did."

In their fourth year, Fey and Bennett disrupted the final moments of auditions for a play Warner was directing. The show, On the Fourth Day, was about soldiers during World War II; there were no parts written for women at all. Fey and Bennett entered through a side door and marched onstage. "They'd gone down to the prop shop and found military helmets, rifles and army boots," Warner says. The two performed a skit about female soldiers in World War II ("a fierce battle scene against an invisible enemy," Warner says) before running offstage and allowing casting to resume.

"The comment underneath it all was, 'Why not do shows that women can get roles in?'" Warner says. "Tina's a social critic, but she's always done it with humor."

Betsy Tucker, Fey's first acting professor at UVA, remembers Fey as a "smartypants" who "would certainly make fun of anything she wanted to make fun of." She described Fey at "Dram Prom," a theater event at the end of the academic year where students would do send-up sketches of their professors. "Tina always did me, and I was very flattered, because she was kind of ruthless about it," Tucker says. "She would always make fun of me for my smoking, for not shutting up, interrupting people and rolling my eyes when men started to say, you know, terrible things." She laughs. "She nailed me. If she weren't so good at it, I would have taken offense, but God, it was funny."

The Best Use of Me

Most of Fey's stage roles at UVA were not particularly glamorous. "I played a silent maid who moved chairs around in Amadeus," Fey says. "I was a chicken carrier in Much Ado About Nothing." Garey, who now teaches in the UVA drama department, recalls the bit roles she and Fey played in a production of The Elephant Man in 1991. "We were the pinheads—circus freaks who appeared in a dream sequence. The costumes were loose-fitting burlap with heavy padding underneath. If that wasn't humiliating enough, the director of the show could never, never remember our actual names."

Tina Fey and Cady Garey pose in their "pinheads" costumes for the 1991 UVA production of The Elephant Man.

In her fourth year, Fey was cast in her first and only leading role, as Sally Bowles in Cabaret. "I remember the day I cast her as Sally," Bob Chapel said in an interview in his office. He pointed to the doorway, "She came down that very hall after reading the cast list, just floating; she was so happy."

In her speech, Fey discussed her Cabaret experience: "There was this moment at the end where Sally is hoisted up on a chair, high above the chorus, and I hit a note so sour that they almost dropped me," she said. "It started to occur to me that I might not be an incredibly talented actress."

Her self-deprecation about her acting skills pops up often in interviews and acceptance speeches. When she received the 2010 Screen Actors Guild award for her performance on 30 Rock, she said in her speech, "I want to thank some of my acting teachers, because I actually did have some," and then gulped, as if she'd told a lie. She then went on to seriously thank Warner and Tucker.

Tucker thinks that Fey may not see her acting ability as remarkable because "it comes naturally to her." Her gift for imitation "was an early learned behavior. She has a very quick mind and a quick mouth," Tucker says. "What's brilliant about Tina is that she also has the physicality. It's not just in her wit; her whole body is comic. It's not that she doesn't work hard—it's just that some of the keys to acting, she had early."

Fey says UVA was the first place she got a taste of what it was like to write for other people. In her fourth year, she wrote her first one-act play, Sunday Girls, about a group of young women reuniting in their hometown for the wedding of a mutual ex-boyfriend. Their hometown is, of course, in suburban Pennsylvania, the same place Liz Lemon and Fey herself are from.

"That was my first experience of not being in the play, of watching it from the outside, and hearing laughs, and just thinking, 'Oh my gosh, this is very gratifying, more gratifying in some ways than being in a play,'" Fey says. "I thought, 'Oh, OK, that's what I'm supposed to do. That's the best use of me. I'm supposed to write things to make people laugh.'"

After graduation, Fey moved to Chicago and began a career in improv comedy. Garey moved to Chicago to pursue acting as well, and often went to see Fey perform in shows at Improv Olympic and then Second City. Garey also took some improv classes, but says she "never got as in-depth as Tina was. It was apparent even then—she just clicked with it from minute one."

"This is going to sound weird," Bennett says, "but I always had enormous confidence that Tina would be successful. She's always been my favorite writer of things." In the fall of 2001, Bennett returned to the U.S. after spending a year in Taiwan. She says she was "staggering, jetlagged, around San Francisco," when she came upon a giant poster at a bus stop. "And I'm like, 'That looks like—that's Tina Fey on that bus stop. It's Tina Fey on the bus stop.'"

At that point in her career, Fey was head writer of Saturday Night Live and co-anchor of the show's "Weekend Update." Mean Girls, 30 Rock and Sarah Palin were all to come. "There's so much work she's accomplished," Bennett says. "She's the hardest working gal in show business, just as she was in school."

I Want to Go to There: Fey's Return to UVA

On the morning of Fey's speech in September, ecstatic students snapped photos with Fey as she walked around the Lawn and the Corner. Fey also met with Arts Scholars students for a Q&A session in the drama building. When one student asked her what was one thing that she wished she had done sooner in her career, she replied, "I wish I had started waxing my eyebrows earlier."

"That may seem flip, but it's so honest. Tina's not afraid of saying the things that maybe we all think, but wouldn't say to someone else," Garey says. "She's OK with being vulnerable in some areas of her life, and people feel immediately comfortable with her."

The night of the speech, as people in UVA's McIntire Amphitheater, packed from the foot of the stage all the way back to McCormick Road, waited for Fey to take the stage, they began chanting her name, pumping their fists in time. A clip reel ran highlights from Fey's career—her precise comic timing on "Weekend Update"; her performance as Liz Lemon, dreamily stating, "I want to go to there," and fawning over Oprah; and, of course, her uncanny impersonation of Sarah Palin on SNL. When a scene from Mean Girls flashed on the screen, the audience drowned out the audio with cheers—many in the crowd had grown up watching the film. When Fey came onstage, she may as well have been the Beatles on their first U.S. tour. She thanked the audience warmly and immediately cracked a joke:

"I'm so happy to be here with you and see you all. I love UVA. I loved every moment of my time here. And I graduated a virgin and have nothing but happy memories. Really, it's just a testament to the architecture. Beautiful."

As she moved through her speech, she did what she does best: communicate with an audience. Dressed in simple blue pants and a black top, she seemed unassuming and even, at times, earnest. "I'd like to tell you about three artists whose work thrills and inspires me, which is how I think art should make you feel," she said.

Fey with Ellie Kayton (Engr '17) and Emily Woznak (Col '17)

She listed comedian Chris Rock, playwright Caryl Churchill and composer and lyricist Stephen Sondheim as the artists who've meant the most to her. Fey, who wrote in Bossypants about falling asleep midsentence when she pulled all-night sessions in her living room with her 30 Rock writers, practically gushed to the crowd about Sondheim's work ethic.

"His work is so finished," she said. "His parents were in the dressmaking business, and I feel like you can tell—it's like his work is stitched together perfectly," she said. "We tried to exercise that kind of care at 30 Rock. We would proof our pages like they were going to the Smithsonian. We would check every detail on a set, because it's your work! It doesn't matter if it's a school play or a dumb TV show—it's your work."

Here, people started to clap. "You should care about it so much that people get annoyed with you!" Fey cried, and the crowd of students, faculty and artists cheered back.

Fey nodded and smiled, almost shyly. She had been speaking for nearly 40 minutes and the temperature had dropped into the low 50s. She leaned into the microphone. "Just two more hours to go," she said quietly, her expression a perfect deadpan. The crowd, of course, answered her with applause.

Comments (3)

john pearson wright on 08/20/2014

Just had the enjoyment of reading Molly Minturn’s excellent article, “Girl Most LIkely”. After receiving my diploma from UVa, I decided to move to Manhattan not unlike Ms. Fey. After 10 years, I became a show biz photographer. I was fortunate to be tapped to photograph the publicity stills of actors/guests on the NBC show “Inside the Actors Studio”.

By some nice luck, the director of the show asked me to join him with two NY prized tickets to see “Saturday NIght Live”. Well, we eventually got hilariously swept away by Tina doing “Weekend Update” and her send up of Sarah Palin— a one woman comedic tour de force.

We left the studio and walked in the winter night out of NBC ( located at 30 Rockefeller Plaza) looking for a good Scotch to come down from the show.

My host chose Hurley’s around the corner on 6th Ave. where the SNL cast throw their final wrap party after rehearsing all week. The fun continued. It occurred to me looking in that bar mirror that two UVa alumni had the real ability to influence and impact voters in a US Presidential Election. I pondered Tina Fey’s character, Sarah Palin and Katie Couric’s Palin interview on the subject of her favorite newspapers.

Jefferson would be most proud of this— “for here were are not afraid to follow Truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error so long as reason is left free to combat it.”

Cheers Tina & Katie— we raise a glass to you and dear ol’ UVa…
..

was fortunate a New York photographer, I was of twenty years, I applaud Tina Fey for her comedic, send- up of Sarah Palin.
It was right on spot

Ted Homyk on 01/17/2014

Tina Fey is one of my favorite and admired entertainers. I am proud that UVA spawned her and enjoyed this biography of her time at UVA and shortly after her graduation very much. Well written.